ALERT:
This video contains flickering / flashing lights.
(Sunlight beaming through leaves / blurred traffic lights blinking in distance.)
Today’s discovery: fishing boat is an experimental composer! Play the full range if possible.
Tascam-ed this evening as I sent it off to the moon-lit Pacific.
Task at hand: Spider Lily Red – Flare (One). Visual snippets are from late March to mid April, recorded easy breezy as the cherry blossoms came and went.
We live on a Planet of Jewels.
A macro shot of a spider lily petal, and,
the first of the “Spider Lily Red” dresses, close detail of the front panel, almost there, how it looked this afternoon.
Last Edited: December 06, 2020.
The year in review, 2016.
Leave the last page blank; leave it to interpretations.
(Jizou: a Buddhist rock statue, its humble presence usually found on roadside, in a corner of a temple, as a requiem for departed, an aid for suffering.)
Best jizous I’ve ever seen live in my neighborhood. Their stone-made presence weighs of the spirit. I sit and ponder on their shrine’s faded wooden verandah. So lucky, ain’t I. Then I glance over, their expression exudes. Surely honey, indeed, and that is quite so with everybody. Lucky, everyone, in ways no one else can know.
Carved, most probably by a monk on pilgrimage, he won it within himself, to let it speak through the simplest of lines. You ought to know simple is hard, creativity brutal, what you got inside, turns up regardless. That’s quite alright they say, they are the best jizous I’ve ever seen.
Red of the lilies around them somehow look the deepest. Someone who knew, once stood here. I think of the monk, the time he lived long since past, chiseling in bold, determined strikes, what he conveyed a timeless truth. Walking back to my car I find, in a bouquet of my favorite lilies, a glimpse of my own lucky bouncing in my arms.
All photos were taken on last Sunday of September 2016, at a location, best remain undisclosed, where I regularly raise a cup to our individual luckies.
On September 4th, noctilucas visited the bay I frequent. Just a few days after New Moon. I hid from LED street lights and watched for hours, the waves, broke with neon blue contours.
One other time I saw them, it was on a ripple-less shore, on one of the tiny islands of Seto. I was very young, three, four, maybe five. The glowing blue edge of the warm, still water, the way I felt that night. I remember, as if, I was alone with the sea.
In progress: “Spider Lily Red”, acid dye on silk. The top is the Lily, the inspiration, back to blossom for the next couple of weeks.
#ownyourshadow, it’s a political act.
Sat, sipped, pondered: will this look okay in red? July 11, 2016, a moment before diving in.
The project in question: Spider Lily Red, at a delicate transition from pencil-on-paper to acid-dye-on-silk.
Everything’s got a little black within it.
A discovery on Swallows: a compact aerodynamic frame was accompanied by the expression of an eagle.
Crazy, sexy, cool. Naming just a few, start from top: Oxalis (Imo Katabami), Spiderwort (Murasaki Tsuyukusa), Meadow Sage / Salvia Guaranitica
Cast of characters, clockwise from top left: Yarrow, Cherry Sage, Can’t Recall, Salvia Guaranitica (flower only), a cuppa java, my best friend Sofi asleep in the phone, Pentax WG3 in micro-macro mode.
Thank you, to the month of June, for all the scents, shades and shapes,
and Thank you! for your visit.
While teaching myself how to use fabric dye, I worked in a office translating mostly medical professionals’ scribbles. I’d carve out five minutes here, ten minutes there, to somehow get my art thing going, until eventually I became the only worker on self-appointed flextime.
On Mondays during lunch I’d walk past several cafes with too many tiny tables, on a cluttered Tokyo street down to a florist, and for a couple hundred yen choose just one flower to place on my desk, a beige-gray rectangle. As an ongoing art education I’d pause between each paragraph for a few moments and closely observe the blossom of the week.
Flower shop flowers always made me a little sad: straight stemmed, sterile, tagged. I eventually parted ways with the scribbles, but what I’ve seen in each flower stayed with me, it’s the remembering of the field somewhere outside their greenhouse, accumulated stories woven into their roots. Years later, they found their way into an enlarged flower petal about to be painted on a dress, on silk with the fabric dye, now my medium of choice.
Despite the art interferences, I fulfilled my responsibilities at the scribble’s. Enough so that few years later the same people invited me back, flextime and all, which was very nice of them, but I had already made other plans, to give my all to the art thing.
The choice smart or otherwise? One thing I know, it was the only one, and I blame it on those flowers with stems too straight, and all the moments I shared with them.
Belles in the bouquets, all picked in the wild, from top, Japanese name in brackets for accuracy sake:
– Bell Flower (Hotaru Bukuro) / Honeysuckle (Suikazura) / Hyacinth Orchid (Siran)
– Hydrangea / Spiderwort (Murasaki Tsuyukusa)
– Dame’s Violet (Hana Daikon) / Yarrow (Nokogiri Sou) / Oxalis (Imo Katabami – the pink in focus. They were “asleep” at the time of photographing, which was immediately after getting picked from under a shrub.) / Cherry Sage (Yakuyou Sarubia – leaves only) / Fennel (leaves)
– Polygonum (Hime Tsurusoba) / Coral Flower (Haze Ran) / Herb Robert (Hime Fuuro)
– Adenophora Gaudi Violet (Sobana) / Gooseneck Loosestrife (Tora no o) / Prunella Vulgaris (Utsubogusa) / Gymnaster Savatieri (Miyako Wasure) / Spiderwort
In blurry background is the various stages of the dress series “Spider Lily Red” in the making in chronological/ascending order, with photo copies of 2 large pencil drawings of a spider lily petal pinned on the wall.
Also refer to my previous posts for the actual size of the petal, and the daring demeanor of each petal and my earlier attempts at grasping some of it upon fibre.
